Your trusted source

American writer and journalist David Farley shared with his expressions of his tour in Baku. He writes in his world famous blog Gadling that tourists do not arrive in Azerbaijan because of high prices and difficulties in getting visa.

The author writes before his departure to Azerbaijan his friends and family members, people he meet at cocktail parties, always asked him the same question: "Azerbai what?" When he called his cell phone company to get on an international roaming plan, the woman on the other end of the line asked him whether it was in Paris, France area.

As the article says, Azerbaijan is in an odd geographical position, wedged between Iran to the south and Russia to the north, “It's a predominantly Muslim culture but one where its citizens are prone to pounding vodka from time to time.”

According to the journalist he stopped at the hotel Four Seasons as it is the only hotel he could afford. Farley says Baku looks like a place one would want to go. Yet, no one is really coming to Baku yet. They poured in for the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest but that was it. The price of things is high, on par with Western Europe.

“The leader of this nation is Ilyam Aliyev, who may be president for some time. Voters in a 2009 referendum decided by an apparent 92 percent of the vote to scrap presidential term limits. Photos of President Aliyev's father, Heydar, who was president before him, are ubiquitous: his face graces large billboards in and around Baku and well as throughout the countryside, giving the impression that "dear leader," alive or dead, is always on the watch,” the author says.

Journalist reminds that in September 2010, on the banks of the Caspian Sea, a plus-sized Azerbaijani flag was raised on a very tall flagpole. Azerbaijani officials proudly made a proclamation: that in Baku, the capital of the country, the world's largest flagpole at 531 feet now stood, thus besting South Korea and Turkmenistan. “Sadly, the odd global flagpole war was not over: a year later, in Tajikistan a 541-foot pole went up and Azerbaijan had to move on to other things,” the author says.

“If they let me back in to Azerbaijan (don't forget that getting a visa is a pain), I'll be looking forward to seeing how the country has developed in a few years. By that time, the famous flagpole might have dropped to fifth or sixth tallest in the world. And maybe I'll see a few tourists here. Enough, anyway, that the only place I'll be able to stay is a hostel,” Farley adds.